


Of Witherings

by ackermom



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, M/M, Other characters only mentioned, post chapter 84
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-19 22:16:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10649160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ackermom/pseuds/ackermom
Summary: Levi returns to the house where he buried his heart.





	Of Witherings

**Author's Note:**

> "There is love in holding and there is love in letting go." -- Elizabeth Berg

The smell is pungent, but Levi would know it well anywhere. Death filled the streets of the Underground; people rotted away in alleys and backstreets, sick and alone, and it wouldn’t be long before the rats found them and gnawed for whatever meat was left on their thin bones. There were bodies on every corner. He had never known so many people to live in the Underground, until he’d ventured deeper into its bowels and found a skull rolling down every street.

The whole house reeks. He stands on the quiet road for a long time, wondering if he has the right place. He doesn’t quite remember where…

The garden is overgrown with weeds, and vines of ivy crawl up the side of the house, trailing past broken windows and cracked bricks to reach the shattered roof. He isn’t sure that this is the right house as he walks up the littered garden path. But the front door hangs open, halfway off its hinges, and as he approaches, he recognizes the smell that wafts out of the small house, and he knows he has found the right place. Even from outside the house, the smell is wretched. He wrinkles his nose, repulsed, but that doesn’t stop him from stepping up onto the stoop and pushing past the broken door. The room is entirely unfamiliar even though he’s been here before. That was a long tim ago; a lot has happened in that year since, and he is not the same person. Still, he thought it would all come back to him when he got here. But this house is foreign to him. He feels as though he is intruding, stepping into the remnants of somebody’s world.

The front door opens into a small kitchen, but it’s barely recognizable as such. A family of crows have built their nest into the abandoned chimney. Leaves litter the floor atop a thick layer of dirt, grime, and insect shells. The tile floor beneath is barely visible. The rest of the room has been overturned, presumably by rats and scavenging raccoons. This place looks like it was once a hunting ground for the animals left behind in the evacuation; now it is the final resting place for their bones. 

It irritates him. He kicks a bird skull across the floor and purses his lips. He doesn’t remember if the house was like this before, but it’s been abandoned for nearly six years. These remains must have been here since then. In that case, why choose this house… He trails through the kitchen, his boots scuffling through the debris. There’s another room beyond the kitchen, but the roof has fallen in over it and the doorway is blocked by bricks and broken tiles. Levi crosses around the fireplace to stand before the staircase that leads upstairs. It sits quietly, ominously, but it beckons him to climb. He knows what lies upstairs, and still he goes. It’s why he’s come back here, after all. 

He takes the stairs one at a time. The smell grows stronger the closer he gets to the top, and he holds his breath, his eyes turned away from the top landing. The old wood creaks beneath his feet. For a moment, he thinks the staircase may collapse underneath him and swallow him up in the rotten decay. Maybe he’ll be eaten by the worms. But he takes another step and the staircase holds. He keeps climbing.

He pauses on the stairway just before the door at the top. Kenny had found him in a room just like this, alone in the corner, his mother dead on the bed, just like-

It wasn’t the first he had seen of death, but it was the closest he had gotten up to that point. He remembers when she died; she coughed up blood for a week before her lungs finally gave out, and after she had collapsed in silence back into the tattered blankets, he had sat by her bedside until her hand grew cold and staff in his little grasp. He takes the final step up the stairs, the old wooden floorboards groaning beneath him, and he puts a silent hand on the door. He had half hoped this building would be gone by now: that it would have shattered under age and stress and that there would be no compulsive insanity for him to come back here. But it stands just as it did a year ago, and Levi takes the final step to enter the room. 

The reek of rotting flesh hits him head on as the door creaks open. He stumbles back, clasping a hand to cover his mouth and nose as the vile smell burns down his throat and latches onto his brain. This is how he will remember this: coughing the bitter remnants of life out of his lungs. He hesitates at the doorway a moment more, resisting the urge to vomit down the stairs. He closes his eyes, his hand grasped tightly over his mouth, and takes a second to breathe. He leans against the doorframe in silence, his head tilted back, his eyes sealed, as he forces himself to suck in the vile air. In a few minutes, he has acclimated to the smell, and slowly, he opens his eyes. 

The bed lies on the far side of the room. He knows that; he remembers. It is the first thing he sees, the natural looking point for anyone entering the room, but he looks anywhere else as he shuffles forward into the small space. The windows are cracked and their curtains have been torn to death by moths; but the sun shines through anyways, casting golden rays over the dusty wooden floor of the attic space. The walls are bare and pale. There is hardly any sign that there was once life in this room; besides the bed, there is only a small nightstand and some chairs. Levi passes them on his way to the bed, and he stops to run his finger along the back of one of the chairs. Dust clings to his skin, and he flinches. As he wipes it off, he glances up, daring his eyes to venture closer yet to the bed. There used to be a small vase, there, on the nightstand; something he had found below in the kitchen. He had carried it up here, then gone back down again to pick some flowers from the bushes, then come back up and set them in the vase with the rest of the water from his canteen. He hadn’t expected the flowers to live long, but he thought they looked nice. They made the room feel like a home. He was in the upper city once, when he got caught in a funeral parade; the people threw flowers into the street as the coffin passed, but their petals were crushed beneath of the pallbearers, dressed in black. He had thought it a waste of fresh flowers.

The vase is gone. Somewhere in the past months, it fell off the small table and shattered into blue-green pieces that dance in the sunlight. He glances around the room, looking for signs of animal intrusion to blame for the broken vase; there’s an abandoned bird’s nest in the rafters above, and the same blue-green sparkles from up top. At least someone used it for good. 

Levi stands there for a moment more, staring up at the ceiling. There’s no longer a cause for delay. There is only one piece of furniture standing in this room that he has not examined yet, and it is the one he has drawn his eyes away from at every turn. He feels weak, suddenly; he wishes he was a child again, that he could sit down at the end of the bed and cry like he did when his mother died. He wishes he could do some things over, or at least remember some things better. He wishes he could sit here and weep for days, but there are soldiers waiting for him only a few streets over. There are no tears in battle. Still, for the first time in a long time, he feels his eyes grow wet and misty. His vision blurs, the bird’s nest slipping in and out of view. He clenches his jaw, throws a hand over his eyes, and turns his face to the ground, finally letting out a sob that pulses through his shoulders, his stomach, his hands, his blood until his whole body seems to be weeping. 

He grits his teeth and wipes the tears from his face. He gets close enough to the bed to see that the cloak has been mangled. Something has been here: a raccoon or a feral dog, maybe, the same thing that knocked over the vase. Something was hungry enough to follow its nose into this quiet, broken house and-

He stumbles back from the bed until he hits the wall, then turns violently and vomits onto his boots.

**Author's Note:**

> "He was my North, my South, my East and West,  
> My working week and my Sunday rest,  
> My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;  
> I thought that love would last forever:  
> I was wrong."  
> \--W.H. Auden


End file.
